From an early age children develop ideas about their gender and how they should behave. These ideas come from a child’s background, the media, advertising and within the classroom (Reay, 2001, p.155; Skelton, 2001, p.100). This guide is for early learning educators is and will describe and discuss the issues associated with gender stereotyping. This guide will also provide a strategy to address the issues within early learning and provide a professional development activity to help teachers better understand gender stereotyping. This guide will illustrate how gender stereotyping occurs in the classroom, why it is important for educators to understand the issues, how relationships and behaviour are affected and the limiting nature …show more content…
Emotions
Men do not share emotions and they should not cry, but women are very emotional and it is ok to cry.
Interests
Men like sport, fishing, 4WDriving, and women like gossip magazines, shopping and make-up.
(Rayne, 2015)
Gender stereotyping in the classroom.
From a very early age your students have well developed ideas about what boys and girls ‘should’ feel, like, do, and behave (National Union of Teachers, 2013, p.6). As an educator you may be reinforcing gender stereotypes in the classroom, either implicitly or explicitly.
Here are some questions to get you thinking about how you may be reinforcing gender stereotypes in the classroom:
• Do you give blue stickers to boys and pink stickers to girls?
• Do you choose girls for cleaning tasks, and boys for more physical tasks?
• Do you describe the boys in your class as being more boisterous than the girls?
• Do you encourage the girls to play with the dolls and the boys to play with the building blocks?
• Do you pick different types of books to read to girls or boys?
(Portfolio, 2014)
Why do educators need to know about gender …show more content…
This has led researches to ask how schools have influenced this gender inequalities. The school environment can either encourage or discourage the view that masculinity is anti-social and oppositional to authority. If the school environment does not challenge the dominant masculinity represented in popular culture then it is very unlikely academic success will be associated with being masculine, and therefore seen as a sign of weakness (Skelton, 2001, p.114; Legewie & DiPrete, 2012